January 2017

UKCloud, the easy to adopt, easy to use and easy to leave assured cloud services company, today announced its tenth round of price reductions, which are phased from 1st January 2017, across two of its most popular services: Cloud Storage and Enterprise Compute Cloud. The result of significant economies of scale and investment in hyper-converged infrastructure, UKCloud's latest price reductions coincide with price hikes elsewhere in the industry, particularly from US corporations.

UKCloud's Cloud Storage provides a cost-effective storage repository for a variety of sensitive data assets, including body worn video and medical data. The company's investment in innovative hyper-converged infrastructure has completely refreshed the cloud storage platform, which is designed to deliver improved performance and functionality at a greatly reduced cost. Customers with large-scale requirements will pay just 1.5p per GB per month; this is a reduction of 66 percent and makes UKCloud's offering significantly cheaper than those of the leading US cloud providers. Customers with smaller requirements will see the price of their services fall by almost 80 percent, from 9p per GB per month to 2p per GB per month.

Flexxible IT, provider of turnkey enterprise computing solutions powered by Citrix technology, today announced a new hyperconverged appliance designed to help SMBs simplify the deployment, operations and support of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments and applications, including Microsoft Office 365.

The solution-Flexxible|SMB Cloud-uses Citrix XenApp, XenDesktop and NetScaler as well as Microsoft Windows and Office 365 products in a 2U appliance that enterprises can install in as little as 30 minutes. The Flexxible|SMB Cloud has been verified as Citrix Ready with XenApp, XenDesktop and NetScaler. Flexxible IT is also committed to support the Citrix Ready HCI Workspace Appliance program, announced separately by Citrix, in an upcoming release of Flexxible|SMB Cloud.

The announcement was made at Citrix Summit in Anaheim, Calif., today. Flexxible IT is a Platinum Sponsor of the event and is providing live demos in booth 206. Additionally, Flexxible IT CTO Kilian Arjona will present in a session today at 2 p.m. in Platinum Ballroom 3.

In the growing migration to the cloud, the transition journey varies between each organization. In fact, a Forrester Global Business Technographics Infrastructure Survey found that 38 percent of enterprises have not adopted any cloud infrastructure, while 23 percent of respondents have adopted one cloud, and 38 percent are using two or more clouds. There is a clear need for an architecture and a management platform that enables customers to manage workloads on the infrastructure they use today, while giving them the ability to migrate to one or more clouds. That's why Citrix is announcing new offerings at Citrix Summit 2017 in Anaheim, Calif. that provide the solution packages, tools and support to help customers, regardless of where they are in the cloud adoption process.

Citrix is introducing new packages to transition from on-premises licenses to Citrix Cloud for existing customers, services that enable Citrix and Microsoft customers to deploy Windows 10 desktops on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, services to deploy apps directly on Azure, and Smart Tools to simplify the deployment of new workspaces. In addition, Citrix is announcing a new Citrix Ready partner initiative targeting the mid-market along with mobility and network management products and services that complement Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) and provide comprehensive security and value for Citrix and Microsoft customers.

"With these products and services, Citrix and Microsoft are meeting partners and customers wherever they are on their journey to the cloud, whether they continue to keep IT infrastructure on-premises, or they are moving to hybrid cloud or public cloud deployments," said PJ Hough, senior vice president, Product, Citrix. "Whether they are ready to go all-in on the cloud, or they want to deploy a single app in the cloud, we have the management platform and the services they need."

Liquidware Labs, a leader in desktop transformation solutions, today announced the general availability of Stratusphere UX 5.8.6 with a number of new features, including new virtual GPU (vGPU) metrics as well as dashboard enhancements, greater security and more. The company is demonstrating the software at Citrix Summit 2016 Anaheim this week (Booth #408).

"Stratusphere UX continues to lower the barrier of entry for the diagnostics and monitoring of end-user workloads" said David Bieneman, CEO, Liquidware Labs. "The solution's ability to focus on all users, machines and applications, while defining a quantitative metric for user experience, is the defining aspect of Stratusphere. And now, with more granular vGPU metrics and enhanced dashboard views, Stratusphere UX offers greater capabilities in support of trending, optimizing and diagnosing the challenges faced in next generation end-user workspaces."

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that OVH has joined the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider (CCSP) program, offering customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) greater confidence from a partner ecosystem when building their next-generation IT projects using Red Hat solutions. As a Red Hat CCSP, OVH can use Red Hat technologies within its datacentres and offer its customers access to more robust, flexible and open solutions for their infrastructure projects, including hybrid and containerized architecture.

OVH is a French enterprise providing IT services to more than one million clients globally via its 18 datacentres located in Europe and Canada. Its commercial activities have helped it to become a leading hosting provider both in Europe and globally.

BlackMesh, a leader in enterprise cloud-based solutions, announced today it is continuing to provide innovative technology solutions to the government by launching a new cloud platform focused on security services.

The newly-launched government cloud solution platform meets federal and state requirements for protecting and storing critical data and enables federal, state, and local government agencies and organizations to achieve safe and flexible cloud compute and storage within certified data center facilities.

"As more enterprises across all categories of government begin to leverage the cloud, it is clear to see the importance of making Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions available to them that are as secure and reliable as possible," said Jason Ford, CTO of BlackMesh. "We've developed this security-focused cloud solution to consist of seamless data security measures, while remaining customizable based on the customer's unique requirements - this solution is ideal for government agencies of all types and sizes."

Cloud Technology Partners (CTP), the premier cloud services and software company for enterprises moving to cloud, announced today that it has achieved the AWS IoT Competency designation from Amazon Web Services (AWS). CTP is one of a select number of AWS Consulting Partners to earn this competency, highlighting the value of its offerings that help clients build IoT solutions for a variety of use cases such as intelligent factories, smart cities, autonomous vehicles, precision agriculture and personalized healthcare.

Achieving the AWS IoT Competency differentiates CTP as an AWS Partner Network (APN) member that has proven success delivering IoT solutions seamlessly on AWS. To receive the designation, APN Partners must demonstrate expertise in the AWS platform and undergo an assessment of the security, performance and reliability of their solutions.

WSM International will provide migration services for organizations interested in easily, safely and quickly moving their IT infrastructure to LeaseWeb's range of hosted and cloud services.

WSM is the leading provider of cloud migrations services, with a 14-year history of and experience with migrating workloads from onsite to hosted cloud services. In working with the world's leading hosting and cloud services company, WSM has successfully completed tens of thousands of migrations, from the simplest web sites to complex enterprise IT workloads.

Today, Redis Labs, the home of Redis, announced new integrated billing with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Redis Cloud is currently available on AWS globally, and enterprises can now access the Redis Cloud via AWS Marketplace and pay for their Redis Cloud subscriptions on their AWS bill.

AWS customers can simply click to select Redis Cloud on AWS Marketplace, and Redis Cloud charges will be added to the AWS bill without any additional payment processes required, making it even easier for organizations to seamlessly purchase SaaS solutions. Redis Cloud is one of the first database-as-a-service (DBaaS) providers to be made available through AWS Marketplace. The Redis Cloud pricing model is simple, attractive, intuitive and based on a pay-as-you-go model so customers only pay for the amount of data they consume on an hourly basis at a gigabyte level granularity.

Panzura, the leader in hybrid cloud storage, today announced a new $32 million growth capital round led by Matrix Partners and joined by Meritech Capital Partners, Opus Capital, Chevron and Western Digital as well as an undisclosed strategic investor. The new financing will be used to scale Panzura's leadership in leading the massive transformation of the $32B on premise storage market spend to a cloud first storage model. The monies will also be used to expand Panzura's hybrid cloud storage offerings for high performance database and virtual workloads, big data analytics and Internet of Thing (IoT) applications.

Panzura had record growth in 2016, including adding over 100 new enterprise customers and expanding its channel and alliance presence with leading cloud providers AWS, Google, IBM and Microsoft Azure. Panzura added over 26 new petabytes of enterprise storage in 2016 and its hybrid cloud NAS, archive and collaboration storage products were deployed in over 33 countries across multiple industries and governments.

Oil and gas is hardly the first industry that springs to mind when one mentions cloud computing. The tech that has been expanding at a breakneck pace, disrupting business models and enabling innovation across industry boards, has not really met with a lot of enthusiasm in the energy industry—at least not yet. But this may be about to change.

The silver lining of the 2014 oil price collapse is making itself increasingly obvious: energy companies have had a wake-up call: They must change the way they play the game. Enhancing operational efficiency, keeping costs low, and approaching new projects more cautiously and flexibly are among the changes we have already witnessed...

Microsoft is shifting its licensing for its Azure cloud service, eliminating the pay-as-you-go option for new Azure customers using MPSA (Microsoft Products and Services Agreement) as of Feb. 1. Instead, they will be steered toward the company's CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) program.

Geared to organizations with at least 250 users, MPSA is Microsoft's simplified agreement consolidating purchase of cloud services and software. The move detailed today follows on Microsoft's decision to not proceed with its proposed Enterprise Advantage program, which was meant to allow customers to buy organization-wide on the MPSA...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) acquired San Diego-based cybersecurity firm harvest.ai for a reported $19 million sometime in early 2016, investor Fred Wang has confirmed. Wang, a general partner with harvest.ai investor Trinity Ventures, declined to confirm the terms of the deal, but told GeekWire “it was a good win for the investors and for the management team.”

“The company works in an area called data-leakage prevention,” Wang said. “At one time a lot of companies got into it, but most of them didn’t get much traction. Harvest.ai automated looking at file-access patterns to detect which are normal and which are not.” It does this by using neural nets, natural-language processing, and other AI algorithms, and tracking data storage and access, and components, applications, and users on the network...

The end of 2016 marks the strongest year yet for Cloud Service Management pioneer CloudHealth Technologies. After posting a 130 percent year-over-year revenue increase, more than doubling its customer base, and securing a $20 million Series C round in May, the company enters 2017 as business momentum is accelerating.

"CloudHealth has become an integral component of our customers' day-to-day operations," said Dan Phillips, CloudHealth Technologies CEO and co-founder. "It's extremely gratifying to see the platform solve their complexity challenges and deliver such strong business value. We continue to push customer-driven enhancements and services, which has been a key factor in our year-over-year growth."

Akumina today announced that its software platform for digital workplaces, InterChange, is available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

InterChange allows Akumina's customers to meet all the core requirements of a modern intranet, or ‘digital workplace' including communication, information delivery, systems integration, collaboration and personalization.

Using InterChange developers can build collaborative, personalized and targeted digital workplaces, powered by an organization's intelligence inside Office 365 and other market leading cloud applications, to create compelling digital experiences. Once deployed, the InterChange AppManager ensures internal business users and subject matter experts can easily manage these applications. The AppManager SDK and InterChange DevFramework allow for the extension and customization of InterChange-based applications by Akumina's partners and customers.

SolarWinds MSP, a global leader in delivering comprehensive, scalable IT service management solutions to MSPs, today announced that users of its MSP Anywhere powered version of Take Control can now access Mac devices remotely. This latest release allows IT pros to provide full support to their Mac customers in the same way as Windows users.

MSP Anywhere allows IT service providers to remotely connect to machines to solve IT issues quickly and easily. It gives the ability to connect quickly to a machine, open live chat with customers, transfer sessions to other technicians, ask questions in group chat or silently transfer files in the background without disturbing customers.

This enhancement enables MSPs to provide Mac users full access to comprehensive features such as executive reports, LOGICcards and use of real-time architecture to:

Zetta, a leading provider of high-performance business continuity solutions, today announced that it has been awarded a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office that covers the mechanics of how it makes direct-to-cloud data protection fast and efficient. It also includes protection for technology processes that enable direct-to-cloud backup, without any intermediary appliance or staging area, in addition to concurrent local copies.

The latest in a series of Zetta patents, the new Patent 9,483,359, protects systems and methods which enable Zetta data protection technology for backup and disaster recovery to be applicable to even more customers and use cases, by increasing network transport efficiency. The technology is based on enterprise replication methodologies, which provide state consistent snapshot replication. Like incremental backups, it only transfers changed data segments, but unlike traditional incremental backups it isn't susceptible to a single bad backup invalidating all subsequent backups.

The application containers market will be worth $2.7 billion (£2.2 billion) by 2020, according to 451 Research.

Assessing the performance of 125 container vendors, 451 Research found that growth of the container cloud development technology follows the trend of OpenStack, which also became popular fast. However, the analyst firm said the containers sector has the potential to have a much bigger impact than OpenStack, despite pegging the latter technology's value at $5.8 billion (£4.8 billion) by 2020.

The retail industry is widely adopting cloud computing, with its investment in cloud technologies skyrocketing from $4 billion in 2011 to an estimated $15 billion last year, according to a recent Accenture report. Like the banking and manufacturing industries, retailers are recognizing the transformative role of cloud computing in today’s digital world. Here are the three ways the retail industry is embracing cloud computing to revolutionize long-standing, core business strategies:

Selling Products

Retailers are finding themselves competing in a marketplace that is increasingly dominated by mobile devices. Today, more than 30% of all commerce will occur on mobile devices. Likewise, more than 80% of customers will use a mobile device or app to inform their purchasing decision...